All atwitter

Friday, February 6, 2009

Once upon a time a certain peculiar resident of prussian Konigsberg suggested, in a rather obfuscated and long-winded manner, that while the existence of God is hard to prove, humans have an inherent natural intuition of God, that is, that the concept of God is unavoidable.

I'm agnostic; but for me, the strongest argument for God has always been the existence of my own consciousness, self (which buddhists and some others will argue might not exist -- nobody will however argue with Kant that the inherent intuition of self is pretty self-evident).

So New Scientist has an interesting article today on empirical exploration of how inherent the concept of God is in babies, and whether believing in God is a natural (and beneficial) evolutionary behaviour. Well, let me tell you on that last point: if I had a choice between God and Prozac, I'd probably go with God. He is, after all, all-natural and doesn't have sexual side-effects.

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.